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An incredible healer yet not a saint


 

You are a healer, projected by the dispossessed as a saint in such a way that you spark a revolt, that some would hope to become a revolution. It fails in blood and misery and you are expelled to the nearest neighboring country: in this case, the United States at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century, what happens next?

This is the subtext of Urrea's wonderful sequel to his 'The Hummingbird's Daughter'. This first novel has followed its champion, Teresita, from illegitimate bastard of the local peon, herself thus half Indian, half Mexican, to the pinnacle of her apparent fame as a healer and for many a saint and trigger point for a revolution of the oppressed. Her father has accepted her, loves her, yet fears her consequence, rightly as it happens, because the dictatorship of Diaz falls on his head and he, and his extended family, find themselves in exile in the United States, pursued by Diaz's agents offering assassination. 

Meanwhile, Teresita is famous (or infamous) and can continue to exploit her healing powers but what may this mean in this new world and for her a young woman with all the competing desires that this brings?

So this wonderful, poetic, and moving, novel unfolds. It is historical fiction, based on the very real life of Urrea's great aunt, but, as he says, the story, his story, this story is not simply history.

Her adventures are manifold - escaping assassins, being enfolded in revolutionary plots, traveling across the United States, being helped and exploited by a wealthy Consortium that seeks to benefit from her healing fame, finding a lover, having children, losing her father's sheltering and, at the last, finding home and returning in the last scenes, as she dies from tuberculosis to her guiding tradition of indigenous healing from which she has strayed.

It creates a beautifully credible life of a healer (who equally credibly refutes her life as a saint) painted against the background both of a judicious and appropriately reverent attitude to traditional beliefs (that Urrea acknowledges that he has experientially studied), the complexities of human character lovingly, and often humorously displayed, and the unfolding history of two (or multiple) different worlds - that of the indigenous in the Americas and the (very different) historical trajectories of Mexico and the United States.

What I most deeply loved - apart from Teresita and her father's very disparate characters in dialogue and dispute, is the way Urrea simply allows the very different world of healing to have its place in the novel, acknowledged but not over-emphasized. It is what it is - a phenomenon closely reported and responded to, out of kilter with what we fantasize to be true about the modern world and its materialism,  and yet there, indubitable in people's lived experience. His great aunt was precisely who she was - a remarkable healer, with a given vocation, mysterious to explain, and not a saint but a wounded, complex, lovable human being doing her best to respond to what is given.

The last scenes where she meets her healer guide, and friend, as she passes into death, are one of the most compelling descriptions of 'passing over' that I have read. Get ready for reading your life with humility and awe - and traveling on in awe and humility.



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